Alex Dumitru / Sandossu

There are a lot of blogger good at marketing that only tell their readers what they want to read and make profit of their naivety. Unfortunately, this is far away from quality blogging, because almost all blogs of this kind that I’ve seen offer almost no useful information and only general facts that can be found everywhere.

Readers are subscribing when seeing that blogger earns a lot of money in the hope they will find out how to do it. But rarely this will happen because nobody is that fool to tell their secret and worse than that, a lot are lying just to get a strong readership and profit.

Those blogs mean time loss and a good blogger has to manage his time very good to increase productivity, so only subscribe and read the blogs that can really help you, don’t just get fooled by everyone.

Of course nobody will tell big secrets, but by reading a lot of useful information you can make an idea of what you have to do and test, until you get somewhere good.

What do you think of those bloggers ?

Once with Alexa’s new ranking system announcement, a lot of blogs have lost their rank. The reason is that Alexa is now based on more informations, not only the surfers that have Alexa toolbar installed. Now websites and blogs that had a tech savvy audience have lost rank, Alexa becoming more accurate and not advantaging them anymore.

A lot of popular websites and blogs have met a drastically decrease in rankings, like Problogger ( 3xxx -> 12xxx ), Digitalpoint ( 3xx -> 9xx ), Shoemoney ( 2xxx -> 19xxx ). I have also seen some not-so-major changes in my websites rankings, most of them going down a bit.

I see this changes as an improvement and hopefully Alexa will continue to become more and more accurate, because a lot of people and mostly advertisers are basing on this stats that, at least until now, weren’t relevant at all.

Find more rank changes on some blogs at Amit’s blog or you can read Alexa’s announcement.

For the last few days, StumbleUpon has continuously banned accounts and a lot are complaining that the traffic has went down. I have a lot of friends that were power users and got their accounts banned for different reasons or for no reason at all.

I have also noticed a decrease in traffic from StumbleUpon, but i can’t tell for sure if it’s because of the algorithm or because my websites have been down and flagged as unavailable, due to my servers issues. I will be able to tell more exactly in the future, when I’ll be sure I’ve got rid of that flag.

Lately, Stumble became the best social network, from my point of view, being easier to market than Digg and sometimes brining more traffic. Unfortunately, Stumble isn’t such a good link bait as Digg, but can still bring some quality, related links.

As you might already now, Digg has screwed it’s algorithm really badly from it’s last updates and has hired moderators that won’t let anything pass to the front page, if they don’t like it. That’s why a lot of users left and some of them joined and started using Stumble. Now, Stumble seems to have taken Diggs example, by screwing it’s algorithm.

There truly are a lot of accounts that ruin the system and have to be banned, but in my opinion, they have to focus on aggressively spamming profiles, haters, flamers and others that do a lot of bad and less on those that do promote their websites, along with many others.

With this I have to say Social Networking has reached a crisis point especially for Social Media Marketers, but for regular users too. Some new idea has to come out and I’m curious when this will happen. Considering this, it seems nothing can’t stay clean, but also this was already known. When something gets big, it has more and more issues, because everyone tries to profit.

I would like to read your opinion about this.

The time has come for this blog to get to another lever, along with a new layout. From now on i will post more often and will do my best to make quality posts, as i think now i am more experienced in blogging and the areas this blog is covering.

You should soon see the difference

Wordpress has just released a new great version, with improved dashboard, uploader and it comes with gravatars, internal gallery and more.
You can watch the screencast for a better view of what i am talking about.
Get it now.

When you are choosing your way in life, on the financial side, you have to take a wise decision and think about the future. This is available for everything, the highschool, college, university, job or business. What do i mean by a dead end road is a point when you don’t have an expansion possibility and your monthly earnings cannot increase anymore or increase extremely slowly.

Take a look at some good decisions taken by well known business men, like Sergey Brin, Larry Page and others. If they were choosing to get a job they were probably working from 9 to 5 for a decent salary and had a monotonous life. But they risked and wanted more, so took the good decision.

Now i am talking from my own experience. Three years ago i started learning to code and design and worked as a freelancer, but i was working a lot and had no chance to increase my earnings, because the prices are quite fixed and i was paid on a hourly basis. I was probably able to increase my hourly earnings by learning more and improving my skills, but not much.

Then i said why should i build websites for others so i will get a small price while they will earn much more with them and not build them for myself. And so i started making a few websites and spending less time working as a freelancer. My earnings decreased a lot, but the potential was much higher, so i kept doing it until i stopped working as a freelancer at all.

I started to learn about SEM, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and along with building more websites and improving the current ones, I’ve done some consulting for other companies and earned much more than i did from freelancing. Now I’m very happy and i really think I’ve finally chosen the good road.

So the point is to think about the potential of what you are doing or planning to do, set some goals and start working. It won’t be very easy in the beginning, but done right, every business should expand.

Google has been changing rules lately and it’s banning lots of websites, especially for selling text links. Now, the only way to sell links is to use the “nofollow” tag if you want to remain G’s friend.

Of course not everyone is satisfied with Google’s measures and many continue to sell links, but the problem comes when Google excludes them from it’s index. If G isn’t an important source of traffic for you, then you shouldn’t have any reason to worry, except that once banned you lose the PR and probably no one will buy links anymore.

But what if Google is your main source of traffic and simply kicks your ass ? Then you definitely have a problem. I took KnowMoreMedia’s case, a blog network with a lot of paid bloggers and that had a decent traffic and revenue. Unfortunately for them, Google was bringing the most of the traffic, until they found out KMM is selling text links. Now their traffic has decreased significantly and they aren’t probably even earning enough to pay their bloggers.

In this case is both parties fault, because on one side Google shouldn’t impose this rule, but can do it. On the other side KMM was making profit of G’s traffic and should have followed the rules. Now probably they are going bankrupt because they weren’t responsible enough and didn’t took good actions.

It’s true sometimes we have to risk, but this definitely wasn’t the case, because they were doing much better if not selling the links and getting the traffic from Google, than selling links and getting no traffic or PR. Now they are earning neither from the CPM/CPC ads and aren’t going to sell links anymore, because of the PR0 Google left them with.

The conclusion is you have to take care what measures you take when running your business and never put all your eggs in one basket.

I just logged into Feedburner to check my Blog’s subscribers and i see that three of my blogs went to 0. It seems like Feedburner is having an issue again and unfortunately lately it has had issues quite often.

Hopefully they won’t just lose track of my subscribers and solve the problem, as i am losing both visitors and my subscribers might unsubscribe if they aren’t receiving news from my blogs.

Last month i’ve noticed something opposite from now, when my subscribers went up with more than 100% for one day and then just returned to normally. I’m sure that they subscribed all in one day and then unsubscribed the next one and that was another Feedburner issue.

Are you noticing anything strange today ?

Update: Everything is back to normal now

I think you all know that incentives can’t be good for search engines, but please tell this to both Ask and Microsoft too. After Ask.com allowed a company paying people to search using their search engine, now Microsoft is offering prizes for searching.

What advertiser will be crazy now to pay for his ads to be shown on any of those two search engines, when people are paid to search and will probably just click the ads by mistake, without any potential interest on the product ?

Microsoft has been desperate for a while to grab a piece of the market and has proved it when they tried to buy Yahoo!, but that was a good move, at least in comparison with this one. It looks like they have to think about changing their marketing team, because their decisions are only going to harm the company and make them lose money.

I hope at least Google won’t take the wrong road and keep fighting with the others by relevancy. Anyway they will probably see an increase in ad sales and advertisers moving from Ask and Microsoft.

A search engine is defined by organic traffic. When an internet user needs something he usually searches for it and the webmaster or advertiser gets a targeted visitor interested in it’s content or product. Now Ask is going to change this, read below to see how.

Search engines from the view of a searcher 

As i’ve said above, when you need something you just search for it using one of the many online search engines. If you choose the right search engine, you might find what you’re looking for and be a happy man, if not, consider changing the search engine or the keyword.

Until now that was the only reason to search, but what if you were paid to do it ? Then you won’t probably interested in the keyword you search and just do it to be done.

What search engines mean for a webmaster and advertiser

For a webmaster or advertiser, search engines are a wonderful source of targeted traffic, that convert very well, probably the best. But that is if the user is doing a search because is interested in the product and not paid for it. In the second case, he just does it to get paid and then probably closes the page.

And why do i say that Ask is going to change the definition of the search engine is that a new website released that pays users to search using the specified search engine. MySearchFunds pays you every time you search using Ask.com search engine and this definitely screws the relevancy.

But that’s not so bad for the webmaster, because he is not paying anything to get ranked there, but for the advertiser. I don’t think you’d be a happy advertiser to pay for your PPC ads at Ask.com and then Ask.com to pay somebody to click them, will you ?

The effect in search engine industry

From my point of view, i think the few advertiser Ask.com has will move to Google, Yahoo or Live so only them will have something to win from this. Ask.com will probably just remain a garbage search engine, with cheap, low converting ads, like it wasn’t enough already.

What do you think about this ?